Dinky of the Sisterhooves: From Mere Side Sister to Leader of the Pack · 2:08pm Oct 23rd, 2020
Blog Number 109: A Very Dinky Edition
So how about that Dinky and the Sisterhooves retrospective I considered doing three weeks ago? Let's talk about Best Filly!
Specifically, how I ended up writing anything for her, not just this most recent fic of mine. It's a story that implicates several fics of mine, and has been years in the making.
Back in the "Final Report for September 2020" blog post, I said:
On that note, I'd love to delve more deeply into some behind-the-scenes stuff for this fic, because I surprised myself and loved writing it so much. Still, it was also tiring and time-consuming, so maybe that can wait for another day. It's not like it'll be the last time I take an interest in Dinky and Twilight, for example. There'll be another chance.
Well, I don't have much else going on at the moment, so now's as good a time as any. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Dinky and the Sisterhooves! A behind-the-scenes blog post about Best Filly (to use FanofMostEverything's not-inaccurate term 
) and how I actually ended up writing my own take on her... long after everyone else had done so.
Let us go back to the fandom's prime, back where it began...
It began with a certain background unicorn: Amethyst Star.
Yes, that's right. In the beginning, Dinky was just an add-on to an even more obscure character I was much more interested in. Odd but true.
Let me explain.
In the first half of the 2010s, I generally steered clear of the more famous background ponies. Part of it was simple: they were so popular, they really didn't feel like "mine" to work with. Main canon characters is one thing - I could treat the show as an obvious authority there - but main fan characters? Felt too much like cribbing, at least back then.
So when I wasn't writing about the likes of Fluttershy, Applejack, and Twilight, I generally preferred the roomier margins where I could put my own stamp on a character. Hence why the likes of Amethyst Star caught my attention before Dinky and Derpy did: even now, with two familiar characters as associates, Amethyst simply doesn't get that much attention from the broader fandom. I don't think she even has a codified "core" character the same as they do. Which of course suits me fine.
I'll talk more about Amethyst Star if ever I get a project of hers done, but suffice it to say Dinky was just a bonus back then.
There were still the seeds of her later characterization even then: for reasons that will hopefully become clear one day, she was written as a mini-Lyra. A little mad, very imaginative, fun-loving, emotional, sociable, friendly, and not remotely well-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of grown-up life.
If anything, I had more interest for Tootsie Flute, a.k.a. Liza Doolots (my god, these names 
), simply because she was shown picnicking with Amethyst once (see the picture above: that's her on the right). And even she was just mini-Amethyst.
If my thoughts ever went towards Derpy and Dinky during these years, it was mostly to toy with the different possibility of them not being related, at least not as mother and daughter. True, that's been an iron-hard fan assumption since the early days, but it's still fan assumption, and part of me would prefer not to have ideas dictated to me just because of mere popularity. I'm a bit of a contrarian at times.
So let's hit the skip button and jump to 2016, when Dinky actually got interesting.
The first time I tackled Dinky officially was in Practical Nightmares Only, wherein she wasn't really the focal character (Derpy and Golden Harvest were). I was most familiar with the "ineffably cute" version of Dinky, which annoyed me as I prefer my child characters to be just as diverse and interesting as my grown-up characters.
So for her few scenes, I went with the implied irony of the child character having (slightly) more power than others (namely, by finding out what embarrasses grown-ups and teasing them with it) and being possessed of mischievous, impish tendencies. Plus perhaps a more "wants to grow up too fast and is too observant for her own good" outlook. All while still being reasonably cute and charming.
Understand that a lot of this was just basic "trying to make the character more interesting and three-dimensional" boilerplate for me. I didn't lean hard on any one of these aspects at the time, not least of all because Dinky doesn't appear all that much in it and mostly acts as a recipient to the other two's shenanigans.
For a while after that, I didn't give her much thought.
Things started to change three months later.
In January 2017, Loganberry reviewed the fic as part of a Ponyfic Roundup, this one a Carrot Top edition. It was my first review on his Louder Yay blog, and I remember it particularly for this bit:
Dinky is the most interesting character here, though: rather than the "cute ickle filly" we often see in ponyfic, here she's a much more self-possessed individual; I was slightly reminded of Roald Dahl's Matilda.
At the time, my reply to that bit was thus:
"Dinky is the most interesting character here, though: rather than the "cute ickle filly" we often see in ponyfic, here she's a much more self-possessed individual..."
I am so glad you highlighted this. "Cute ickle filly and nothing but" was the last thing I wanted. I think it's a lot more beneficial, both to writer and to reader, to depict a child character when you know they have minds and attitudes of their own, not all of which are necessarily innocent, cute, or good. And when they can slyly upstage the adults too, of course.
"I was slightly reminded of Roald Dahl's Matilda."
I'm flattered, but I would not aspire so high: Dinky as I intended to portray her has a snarky side and no particularly prodigious intelligence. I also imagined her as having a slightly nonconformist streak when it came to schoolwork, the opposite of an extremely dutiful genius. That said, Matilda is one of my old favourites of the Roald Dahl books, so I'm certainly not complaining about the comparison!
Although Dinky with psychic powers would be kind of interesting...
Suffice it to say, I love Matilda by Roald Dahl. The character and the book. A little genius with a sweet temperament and psychic powers still wins me over pretty quickly. Comparing Dinky to a childhood favourite is bound to leave an impression.
Serendipity can be an odd mistress. A simple subtle highlighting and an unexpected association, all in a review? That sent my mind in interesting new directions...
Despite that knockdown inspiration, nothing really happened outside my head for a while.
Dinky appeared in two more fics later on that same year, 2017. Firstly, the unfinished The Science of Hugging, which was originally meant for a contest about depicting, well, take a guess. I wanted to play with the idea of someone studying them scientifically, which sounded odd to my ears even as I came up with it. Even a little childish.
So I thought that would work best if the idea was indeed a child's idea, but a child with some intellectual curiosity. Hence the Matilda comparison, hence the memory of that review mentioning Dinky, and hey presto, an excuse to use Dinky, Derpy, and Golden Harvest again!
By then, I was starting to build a larger clique for Dinky and Golden Harvest in particular (Derpy I generally used as an additional character in pegasus cliques). Golden Harvest's was easy: just round up some likely earth mares, such as Applejack, Berry Punch, Cherry Berry, and Roseluck. It helped that most of them had a food and catering theme already (and that Applejack was a farmer), so that felt natural.
Dinky's was a little tougher. Even including the CMC, I didn't really have any solidly built child cliques developed for my own purposes. Hence the introduction of Ruby Pinch as just another notable background unicorn, and through her the fan-connected Berry Punch and the awkwardly named Piña Colada. Unfortunately, I hadn't fully developed any ideas for them before, which meant I was writing by the tips of my teeth.
So the project - as so many had before it - dried up.
Later, in an attempt to get the previous project going again, I recycled elements of this story for the second fic that year, Why the Gift is Given, specifically taking Ruby Pinch as the bridge between Dinky and her sister on the one side, and Piña and Berry on the other side.
It was mostly an attempt, once and for all, to pin down my interpretation of Berry Punch, who wasn't going to be just another drunk, but - to give her my own spin - more a manic-depressive type, the sort of pony who's your best friend one day and a horrifyingly embarrassing nervous wreck the next.
In addition to fleshing out Berry's family - which worked well for me, as now they're clearly defined in my mind - it was also a chance to get out there some long-standing details for Dinky's family too.
Which at this point was just her and Amethyst.
Mostly, that's because, despite how late Dinky's characterization was developed by comparison, the strong characterization I'd long had for Amethyst rapidly informed it and gave it shape. In my fics, Amethyst tends to be very Apollonian (in contrast with Berry Punch's more Dionysian outlook): rational, sober (helping here was the association built into Amethyst's name: seriously, look it up), stern and disciplined, no-nonsense, and a bit unimaginative and dull.
So of course, Dinky became something of the opposite: imaginative, free-spirited, and hyperactive. But not totally.
See, the unexpected Matilda connection gave me an opening to complicate her further, which meant she wasn't a complete opposite to Amethyst. Like her, she had some intelligence - hence the scientific interest - and wanted to be taken seriously - hence why she takes it badly when ponies treat her as frivolous and "la-di-da" in this fic.
Still, at this stage, these were mostly seeds for further development.
Dinky reappeared in some flashfics further down the road, mostly in relation to her sister Amethyst again. Officially, that is.
2018 was when my depiction of Dinky really took off. Dinky and the Sisterhooves was actually a very different project back then, intended to further explore Dinky and Amethyst's relationship and differing outlooks. (Derpy was a character, too, but in the early incarnations, she was a beloved family friend, not a blood relative). I'd pinned down at this point what distinguished them and what united them, and here the Matilda reference informed one scene in particular: the library scene. But more on that in a bit.
Originally, too, the Sisterhooves weren't part of it. Late in 2018, though, I wanted to put more focus on Dinky's cliques, and since "Sisterhooves Social" was where her and Amethyst's sisterly relationship was born, I simply went back to that episode and noted the other contestants. I discounted Sweetie Belle herself - because the story was set before she joined in, and it honestly just made it easier to streamline the cast list.
Apple Bloom was relatively easy. Piña Colada and "Noi" (who, for reasons that are too peculiar to recount here, I call Odd Job), I already had a rough sketch of. Alula, a.k.a. "Princess Erroria" was the only one I had no firm idea for, but I figured I could give her a generic "tough pegasus" character and work from there.
In the original story plan, it was a pretty isolated scene with no particularly strong connections to the rest of the narrative. The idea of the Sisterhooves clique, though, stuck in my mind ever since. Helps that I don't think anyone's ever tackled that particular clique before, it allows the possibility of including Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle further down the road, and it roped in some characters I hadn't much considered together before, such as Cloudkicker and Berry Punch.
A bigger player, even in the early stages of the fic, was Twilight Sparkle herself.
Initially, she worked mostly as a foil to Amethyst Star. Even before "Slice of Life", I've always conceived of a one-sided rivalry between "Sparkler" and Twilight Sparkle (one-sided because Twilight honestly isn't even aware of it). That angle was buoyed up by three things: Sparkler's marginal status in comparison to Twilight's popularity, the similarity of the names, of their coat colours, and even of the magical aural hue of these two unicorns, and the way I'd characterized Amethyst based on that one scene in "The Mysterious Mare-Do-Well" (i.e. a lot more sarcastic and tactless than Twilight, magically far weaker and less innately talented, and less well-connected and friendly).
With Amethyst's rational outlook too, "Slice of Life" just confirmed something I'd had bouncing around in my skull anyway. Amethyst in my head still speaks with Cathy Weseluck's sarcastic voice rather than Brenda Critchlow's meeker one, not because it's "better" but purely because the former got there first and left the stronger impression on me ("Aren't you milking this a bit?").
Anyway, back to Twilight.
Since Twilight and Dinky were major players in this fic, it was only natural they should meet somehow. Hence the library scene in Dinky and the Sisterhooves.
Here was where the Matilda angle took an interesting turn, not only because I peppered in a few references (note the ponified versions of stories Dinky claims to have read, and then compare them with the stories Matilda reads when she starts going to the library), but because it opened up the connection between Twilight and Dinky.
The original scene just ended with the main library visit before moving on. There was no break for tea. It was mostly just to establish Dinky and Twilight had interacted at some point.
Yet the compare and contrast between the two became more complicated. There was hero-worship, there was an intellectual rapport, there was a sort of mutual respect for each other's probing.
But there was also Dinky's mischievous anti-authoritarian side, Twilight's slight early cluelessness about social interaction, and the plain fact that Twilight has extreme heroic experiences Dinky can only guess at. It informed the theme of escapism and heroism going on through the original fic: however appealing a make-believe game of heroes can be, a large part of its point is that Twilight's real-world heroism is nowhere near as glamorous or desirable as the foals like to see it. Dinky was meant to be one of the few to pick up on this over the course of the story.
Then nothing much happened in 2019, because I was in a slump. Despite being my most productive year, 2018 was terrible in some regards and I still haven't fully recovered from it, if my lowered output is anything to go by.
All that happened Dinky-wise was a random bit of lunacy in Goldilocks and the Three Months Spent in Young Offender's Prison, which only made obvious the fact that I still had no strong idea how to handle Derpy relative to Amethyst and Dinky. Part of me was pulling towards keeping her a family friend, just to be different, and part of me had already had a bad experience merely regarding her name (I called her Muffins in previous fics, at least initially, which didn't go down a storm and which eventually resulted in me changing it to Derpy), to say nothing of what might occur if I diverged too much from established consensus regarding her motherhood.
Couple that with a growing pessimism about getting my passion projects done, and 2019 was not a good Dinky year for me.
Then 2020 saw some major breakthroughs.
Firstly, an unexpected turn involving Derpy, where I finally bit the bullet and just made her the mother for Mothering, Someday.
That fic alone had some odd precedents: the aforementioned Goldilocks fic had suggested to me how to make the Derpy-Dinky-Amethyst dynamic work to my satisfaction, even if it didn't yet paint Derpy in a particularly flattering light. One of the goals of Mothering, Someday was to redress the balance a bit by emphasizing her patient and compassionate side, as well as giving her a more relatable insecurity.
In addition, on Twilight Velvet's side there was In a Hole in the Ground... and Adventure Belongs in a Book, which ended up cementing my approach to Twilight Velvet, the other mother in Mothering, Someday.
At first, it just seemed like a curiosity to throw her and Derpy together, but as I was writing the two familiar characters more and more, other parallels, other opportunities, and other strange connections became more obvious to me, a big part of which can be summed up in this part of the short summary:
Twilight Velvet is the ordinary mother of an extraordinary family; Derpy is the opposite.
Dinky reappeared there, again with her impish tendencies, her intellectual side, and a couple of added characteristics: her tendency to trust others almost immediately, and her loyalty-inspired frustration at her mother's self-punishing insecurity. There were also a few hints as to Twilight's connection with Amethyst at school (it still kind of annoys me that "Amending Fences" remembered the other unicorns from the premier but apparently forgot Amethyst was right next to Lyra in the same shot), but that's tied up with another fic, and anyway, this is Dinky talk, not Ammy talk.
What emerged from Mothering, Someday was an unexpected dynamic growing between the Twilight family and the Dinky family. There's always been something fascinating about the way the ordinary and the extraordinary can be thrust together, especially in fantasy where amazing heroes can come from seemingly unexceptional families.
Plus, I liked the inclusive feel of the fic: Derpy has an obvious eye condition and I hinted she had some mental problems too, such as with memory and organization, but under this new direction I took, she's still the heart and soul of her family. Dinky might bicker and get into trouble, Amethyst might be the one who actually runs the household, and Golden Harvest might not even be a blood relative. But Derpy is what keeps them together and keeps their lives happy and fulfilled. She symbolizes the family spirit.
That rubbed off on my depiction of Dinky later on.
And now we come, at last, to Dinky and the Sisterhooves.
The first half of the fic is mostly lifted straight from the original version, with few modifications. A few character tweaks here and there, a few clarifications or awkward bits edited out: that kind of thing.
The second half was written in September this year, and was where a lot of the insights of recent months and years were combined with the original vision. Most obviously, Dinky's connection to Twilight is now much more complex and much less perfunctory than it was before, with some of the themes - only implied before - made more explicit for their scenes together. Most obviously, the parallels between the two of them as "leaders" of their respective friendship groups, despite their own weak insistence that they're not "leaders" but equals.
And, naturally, it was a chance to revisit some neglected characters.
Apple Bloom in particular was the same but felt more grounded after I'd already added a few extra details to her characterization for Beyond the Herd. Still insecure, still self-doubting and self-conscious, still hero-worships Applejack up to a point - still proud of her family as a whole - but also still not afraid to speak her mind. And ever since FanofMostEverything drew parallels between her and Twilight, I'm itching to take that connection even further after a few minor hints in this fic.
Piña Colada and Odd Job remained unchanged from their earlier portrayals, though Piña's childishness ended up probably a bit dumber than originally intended. I was also pleased to find a kindred soul in Spike for Odd Job, who I portrayed as something of a resigned, chore-bearing martyr to her older sibling's absent-minded treatment. To say nothing of the contrast between the Apple family and the Carrot family.
If anything, Alula benefitted the most from the delay, as I could attach her "tough pegasus" attitude to some more concrete details I'd considered since then. Firstly, her being interested in space and her sister being obsessed with witches was lifted from "Luna Eclipsed", specifically the costumes they wore for it.
Secondly, her princess fixation was informed both by her fandom name "Princess Erroria" (treated as a nickname in the fic and given its own in-universe backstory), and by my recent interest in finding out more about Magical Girl shows and their tropes.
Thirdly, her exaggeratedly pro-Rainbow-Dash speaking appearance in "Fame and Misfortune", which despite being an episode I could really do without, did provide a few interesting titbits for fleshing out background characters (Amethyst being pro-Fluttershy has not gone unnoticed there either).
And lastly, her blatant contempt for Twilight in that same episode, which just amused me no end when compared with the other traits (fancy having a princess fixation and then finding the local princess is your idea of Boredom Incarnate! ).
Although I haven't written much so far this month - only 12,915 words so far, most of them disjointed - looking back, Dinky and the Sisterhooves really feels like a game-changer for me personally.
Not only is it a fragment of one of my bigger passion projects finally given life, and not only was it the culmination of a lot of threads and networks I'd been developing over time on and off this site, but it feels like the beginning of a new age for further development. The fact that it reads - in hindsight - like the pilot of some spin-off probably helps, as does the collection of fics I still have behind the scenes that are connected to it in some form or other.
No promises or guarantees, mind. Just because some fics this year feel like great achievements, doesn't mean my overall approach to writing has improved. And frankly, after last week, I'm not happy with the idea that I'm working under the best of conditions.
Nonetheless, who knows? A few years ago, I didn't even predict I'd take this much interest in a certain dinky filly, but here we are. Hopefully, sudden and unexpected change can work in my favour too, and when it does, I'll be ready for it.
Until then, thanks for reading, and I hope in the future to get out more "behind-the-scenes" blogs for completed fics!
Impossible Numbers, out.
A most enlightening Brief History of Best Filly. Here's to whatever you have in store for her in the future.
I see. And you did very well with that- When it comes to Tootsie, I prefer Tootsie over LIza, as I find the former is easier to remember for me
5384024
Well, not so Brief History.
Thanks! Here's hoping.
5384040
I generally prefer Tootsie Flute too. It sounds like a more natural cutesy Equestrian name than Liza. I originally was going to have her be another sister to Dinky and Ammy, based on the picnicking scene, but these days I consider her a cousin of Lyra's whom Amethyst knows through Lyra herself. Plus, there's the music theme they both have.
5384061
Agreed. A friend of mine sees her actually as Sparkler's sister, seen as cousin by Dinky. And me, I made it that Tootsie is Lyra's biological daughter